tournament policing

@sheckley666
of course the new accounts are made by "old hands". That is shown by the speed they use lichess features and join tournaments in several classes

As long as online chess chess sites exist, there will be cheaters on them. It's sad, but it's the truth. I just recently started playing again and a big reason I quit was the cheats. I will say that lichess has always had the best response time for banning cheats in my experience. Chess.com always took days or in some cases weeks to ban obvious cheaters I reported. Reported a guy I played in a classical game here the other day. He got marked like 6 hours later.

@Erik1850 6 hours is not bad at all! chess.com takes action at least several days after the claim, i'd say probably weeks or even about a month. As i said there, online cheating is a plague and some are destroying the game for all players. I suggest, for example, that a new account must have x games "won" of activity, if not he could forfit, forfit, forfit, until reach x games played, and the account should have a minimum time open, let's say 3 months until they can play tournaments. That way would be far far more uninteressing to have the account closed and reopened.

There is a club in chess.com called something like cheating club or so. The objective is to talk and take actions against it. In the club presentation they state that it isn't a club for cheaters, they won't teach how to cheat nor give links for software that allows that! when i read it, i thought how many people join them asking how to cheat before they write that in description! Just imagine, hello, i'm playing a tournament, what is the best way to quick find best moves, and don't be caught by the anti-cheating bots, in order to be the champion? :)

@fonsecasf don't get me started on chess.com lol. Closed my account there couple years ago after having to report 4 out of 6 opponents for cheating in rapid... IN ONE DAY. All 4 were banned but that's absolutely ridiculous. At 1900-2000 rapid level there, half your opponents will be stockfish.

@Erik1850 Indeed! i was 1700/1800 correspondence,... seemed all my "friends" were cheating, one by one. I saw about 20 being banned in 6 months. Every tournament so many cheaters. And, because games last for long, while the tournament was running, banned, banned, banned... The official tournaments were so bad... I have lower rating here so far, because i have less games, but it seems different, more human play. In chess.com it seems that play were robotic and so flawless, even if analisys spot an error here and there... Then start the paranoia. He can have a really good game, he can be a really good player, but the suspicious is so high... impossible to get fun like that. I even had one player that after a tournament game messaged me saying sorry because he cheated. Then i get 2nd place don't passing next phase, so he closed his account, making me passing the group. It touched me for the regret and auto punishment. He felt it was undeserved and take position about it.

yay a good discussion.

i think as far as scanning games, if you scanned the top 2/3 players in a tourney that would be sufficient. each game can be scanned and i'm pretty sure it wouldn't take more than 2-3 games to detect if they were using an engine, then ban them. its hard to know what the motivation actually is because very often their account gets closed anyway, so i feel like the sole purpose is to be a dick. you don't get bragging rights or tournament points etc. removing them from the leaderboard is nice for those that worked to get a good standing and imo should absolutely be done, completely removed from everything, however it is probably not a deterrent. the other reasonable option i see is to dramatically increase the prerequisite for tourney play in games played, and possibly results. as far as sandbaggers i think if your bullet rating is 1800 but you're playing in U1500 blitz, that is suspicious if its an ongoing activity.

ps- i feel like post scanning could be difficult becaue you have to adjust a bunch of scores, remove them, etc. do you remove the games completely from the standing or does anyone who played a cheater get an automatic win, draw? still problems to solve but easier to deal with if they are caught early as opposed to the next day

@rxd3ath I think the motivation is deeper. Of course there are the dicks. But, for example titleds, but not only them, it is not that. I believe some surrender to cheat. If you feel everyone does it... i do it to! damn, i'll not lose with this guy because he is cheating, so, i'll cheat. Things like this. Then the players that start losing all games. Enter a downward spiral of destruction and... well, i'll cheat just once. Feels good to win. Then again... We see this in OTB tournaments with protection measures that rival with a prision... Take phones, take watches, metal detection... Stockfish and the likes helped improve the game, but i hope in the end, they don't destroy it...

It's probably possible but it would take some effort to monitor every single tournament. I'm not very tech savvy so I don't understand any of that stuff but keep in mind this is a free site. They may just not have the resources to monitor tournaments that heavily.

@Erik1850 not even chess.com do that. there are tens of thousends of games per day. They have to restrict to complains or to tournaments top 3 for example. This is stupid waste of resources if everyone behave, but... they don't. For me i start to ignore it unless he had an absurd ai help. I'm putting my focus on otb local tournaments that i play almost every week without the cheating problem. Here i try to train and play for fun, no pressure, no stress. I'm getting out of tournaments though because i feel they are the cheaters magnet. Playing normal games, i'm playing normal guys and i don't have a complain so far...